Serving an ace: How Memnon helped ATP Media preserve tennis heritage

How Memnon worked with ATP Media to migrate its ATP 250 and ATP 500 Series tournament footage to a file-based format

By Jenny Priestley

Published: July 3, 2023 Updated: July 4, 2023

How Memnon worked with ATP Media to migrate its ATP 250 and ATP 500 Series tournament footage to a file-based format

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Formed in 1999, ATP Media is the global sales, broadcast production and distribution arm of the ATP Tour, the elite worldwide men's professional tennis circuit. It holds the digital broadcast rights for 64 global tennis tournaments across 200 broadcast territories, involving up to 100 broadcasters serving a worldwide audience of more than 800 million. Through its digital archive site, ATP Tour Archive, thousands of hours of both match and non-match action are available to rights holders and third parties. This includes everything from the original live coverage to interviews, highlights and analysis.

However, having amassed such a vast archive of historical tennis footage, ATP Media was presented with the unique challenge of re-invigorating content that had been sitting on shelves for decades. To serve both existing and potential audiences, ATP Media quickly realised that properly preserving its content library was key to making sure it continued to be accessible and even opened up potential future monetisation avenues.

To do this, ATP Media first wanted to focus on migrating its iconic ATP 250 and ATP 500 Series tournament footage to a file-based format. With footage from 1990 through to 2009, these matches featured top tennis legends in action, as well as the emerging talent who would themselves go on to eclipse all who had gone before them.

Because of the sheer volume of media stored in older legacy formats, ATP Media decided to host its archives in an entirely new cloud location, managed via a media asset management (MAM) platform. This is where Memnon's UK team (previously known by the name LMH) stepped in as the media migration partner for the project.

Digging through the crates The advent of the ATP Tour in 1990 saw the reinvention of tennis as a brand, taking households across the world by storm. ATP enjoyed increased success on the back of a 1991 broadcasting deal for 19 tournaments and was aided by the uniquely compelling storylines and intense rivalries that played out on the court. The 90s witnessed the US trio of Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi and Jim Courier all vying for supremacy. This gave way to the 2000s which saw major title-deciding battles between Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray. These two significant eras of tennis delivered the much-needed televised action outside of the Grand Slams that fans had been wanting for years.

With such a wealth of broadcast programming and recorded content tucked away, ATP Media needed a workflow that could inspect, catalogue and preserve its vast repository of archived material. While the industry has transitioned into a digital era where file-based formats are used almost exclusively, most of ATP's content was stored on legacy-format media. Previously, most assets - predominantly recordings of quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals of the ATP 250 and ATP 500 tournaments stretching as far back as the 90s - were held on SD Digital Betacam with some HDCAM tapes. This made specific metadata requests complex, often causing delays in delivery due to the manual process involved in searching for specific content. On top of that, most of the footage was stored in formats that required machines that were long since obsolete and becoming harder to come by.

Memnon was enlisted to offer its full range of content services, including not only library migration but also file-based content services, such as quality control (QC) and standards conversion (SC).

Establishing the rally In partnership with ATP Media, Memnon had to devise a multifaceted workflow with a strong quality control ethos. Due to Memnon's emphasis on QC and clean-up remedial work to achieve the best possible outcome during ingest, ATP's large volume of content remained high-quality so it could be used for years to come.

With a live archive already commercially available, a lot of flexibility was needed to deal with requests that needed to take priority as well as needing to deliver on a diverse set of endpoints. The workflow itself included a full clean and physical inspection of every single tape, using Memnon's Indelt TC-Matic Betacam tape cleaner, which was utilised to identify physical defects on a tape's surface and clean the tape, aiming to remove as many flaws as possible prior to ingest.

Once the tapes were barcoded (asset labelling) they were then loaded into eight Sony Flexicart robotic cassette changing units. The Flexicarts were under the control of the MediaFlex Mediacart application. The migration from the physical domain to a file domain then took place.

Mediaflex uses the RS422 remote control interface and imported migration schedule to place the VTRs into play at the correct timecode point. The SD-SDI signal was outputted from the videotape recording machines (VTRs) into a production router. This in turn was inputted to a Telestream LiveCapture encoder, which generated the DNx.mxf and IMX50.mxf files required. The ingest was carried out using its SERVOLOCK mode, which enabled the file recording to be automatically started and stopped without the need for any human pre-qualification intervention.

Memnon went a step further to collate record reports into one automated xml report via a Python script to combine all the pieces of metadata into one export file. The delivery was a PDF file that contained images of the tape case, tape cassette, paperwork, vidchecker report, ISR XML, MD5 hash, ATP descriptive metadata and the clea

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